LONDON — Many years ago, when Wayne Rooney was an 18-year-old making his debut at the European Championships with England, a Scandinavian journalist asked for help. He had recorded a question with Rooney but could not understand a word of his reply.

The problem was Rooney’s Scouse accent, a Liverpool dialect difficult enough for Englishmen to understand. And Rooney was, at best, a diffident speaker.

Much has changed. On Monday in Nice, France, Rooney will lead England against Iceland in the Euros. He is the team’s elder statesman, its captain, its spokesman, and he is about to join David Beckham as the country’s most-capped outfield player.

It will be the 115th game Rooney has played for England. And whereas Beckham padded his numbers with short and at times almost celebrity substitute appearances toward the end, Rooney’s role is still pivotal to the team.

One might almost place him on par with another player, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who retired last week from international play after 116 appearances with the Swedish national team.

There is a difference. If Zlatan failed to score, Sweden had almost nobody else who could. England has four capable strikers. So Rooney — still a workhorse who is full of energy, even if he does not quite possess the speed he once did — has adapted.

He drops deeper into midfield and uses his knowledge to be the passer that England has been missing since Paul Scholes, Rooney’s former teammate with Manchester United, retired from the national team 12 years ago.

A captain of industry, rather than a front-runner of sharpness? Maybe, but nobody has scored more goals for England than Rooney has, with 52. And except for maybe Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri, few can strike a scissors kick with such instinctive and almost violent unexpectedness as Rooney still might do.

Iceland knows everything about his career because, as the Iceland players will tell you, very little beats English Premier League soccer on television during the long, dark winter nights near the Arctic Circle.

It will be England, the mother country of soccer, against little Iceland, which has almost become a cliché with its rags-to-riches romance at this year’s tournament. It will be the 330,000 people of Iceland against England and its 53 million.

Using humor and homespun psychology, the coaches of Iceland, Lars Lagerback and Heimir Hallgrimsson, pinned a picture during their training base in the French Alps. It showed a rhinoceros running away from a Chihuahua.

The message was clear. Size and salary are not everything. Nor is reputation.

“We are not the Chihuahua,” Iceland defender Theodor Elmar Bjarnason told English reporters who visited the camp. “If you underestimate us, it’s a mistake.”

Short, succinct and backed up by performances. In reaching this tournament, Iceland beat the Netherlands at home and away and also won against Turkey, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Kazakhstan.

Iceland, built around its stubborn and organized defense, is very difficult to break down. If its players are not the Chihuahua, there is definitely something of a terrier in their mentality.

The Euro tournament has shown so far that no team, far less the Icelanders, will go down without a fight. Rooney knows it, and England Manager Roy Hodgson certainly must know it, because he cut his teeth as a coach in Scandinavia — in Sweden and Denmark.

While the Scandinavian teams might lack — outside of Ibrahimovic — individual flair and hubris, they compensate with esprit de corps and athleticism. Opponents can forget at their peril what Denmark achieved in the 1992 Euros, when it became the smallest country to ever win the tournament.

England, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany all failed to stop Denmark then. And Rooney has played and lost in enough tournaments to know that England’s reputation stirs, rather than scares, underdog opponents.

Listening to him address the media is to see how he has changed not just as a player, but as a man. He is the manager’s assistant on the field, and the players’ frontman for the media.

The accent is less pronounced, and his firebrand temperament now lies beneath the surface.

He is cleareyed, unafraid and unselfconscious.

“You don’t play for the achievement of getting to a quarterfinal,” he says. “We want to win the competition, and we think we can. So I’m not going to sit here and say we’ll be happy with the quarterfinals or the future’s bright because we are a group of young players.”

Young, apart from the captain. Rooney’s main role now is to create chances for England’s strikers, who are likely to be any two from the foursome of Harry Kane, Daniel Sturridge, Jamie Vardy and Marcus Rashford — possibly in that order.

Their tournament, Rooney says, starts here. “I don’t want to be remembered as a captain who wasn’t good for his team, wasn’t good for his teammates, and wasn’t good for his club or country.”

The former Rooney, the player who let frustration get the better of him, is, he says, a different person.

“Having kids,” he concluded, “made me look at things differently.” His three sons, Kai, Klay and Kit are 6, 3, and six months old.

Iceland might push his new temperament to the limits, but he has responsibilities now.